More random fiction complaints!

[conuly]

Sooooo if you are confronted with more silverware at the table than you're accustomed to using, the rule is outside in. You start on the edges and work your way inwards, and unless your dining companion simply enjoys fucking with you they will tell you that rather than muttering "That's the wrong spoon" every time you try to eat your soup. The only people who actually have to remember which spoon is which are the ones setting the table, which brings us to point two:

Nobody's going to set the table with more utensils than they actually plan on using. Nobody. If it's a three course meal, that's three courses worth of utensils, not twenty. There is such a thing as being just too much, and at a certain point everybody's laughing at their faux pas instead of yours. (Then again, if your so called friends have spent the meal telling you you're using the wrong fork without telling you how to find the right fork, maybe they're just rude assholes.)

You can add this to the list of hills on which I'll die.

Comments

[conuly]

We're not talking about definitions, we're talking about etymology. Speculation with no evidence is, frankly, nonsense. You cannot say, with any justification, that since lots of people are illiterate, therefore, evidence or the lack thereof is meaningless. And that *is* what you're trying to say. That whole attitude is irresponsible. It's the sort of attitude that, when normalized, gets us antivaxxers and flat-earthers, who think that what they make up in their heads about vaccines and geology is just as valid as what we know from looking at the facts. Your speculation based on no evidence is not as valid as actual evidence.

We have evidence that the phrase span-new existed in writing before the phrase spick and span. We have evidence that the phrase spick and span new existed in writing before the phrase spick and span. You are saying that because some people can't read, then what exists in writing doesn't mean anything, that we can't actually know things or prove things. There is no logic to this! If your speculation had any basis in reality, then these other phrases would not exist in writing at all.

Meanwhile, there is approximately a zero percent chance that people were using the term "spike" to mean "knife" at any point in England and nobody wrote this down. That's a sort of evidence on its own.

You like this story because there's a story. Well, yeah. We all like stories. But the sad truth is that word histories don't usually have clever just-so stories attached to them. We can make those up all the time, and that's a popular historical pastime, but it's still nonsense. I could make a story right now that it has to do with fibercraft because when something is "spun" (or "span") cleanly there are no "specks". But it's just a story. I made it up. And even if I call it speculation - it's not. It's me making stuff up.

And if this person is willing to make stuff up and publish it like speculation when it's only storytelling, then everything he writes is suspect because he's not doing history, or even pop history - he's doing fiction. He may as well say that spoons and spikes were given to us by ancient aliens at that point, because after all, nobody can prove otherwise.